If this article is to be believed, the world is already in the state of a full fledged cyber war, or is on the verge of it. You do not need rocket launchers or nuclear weapons to win a war against your enemy country; you can bring a country to its knees by using cyber weapons. The full report — published by the IT security firm Cylance — on the skills of Iranian hackers to bring down network services in a far away country is here.

The Operation Cleaver report documents how Iran is the first highly motivated Western world adversary poised to execute serious attacks against global infrastructure, not just targeting the United States, but the critical infrastructure of over a dozen different countries,” said Stuart McClure, Cylance’s CEO and President, in a blog post. “They aren’t looking for credit cards or microchip designs, they are fortifying their hold on dozens of networks that if crippled would affect the lives of billions of people.

The Indian connection: The report also mentions that this Iranian hacking operation — codenamed operation cleaver — has compromised the network data associated with the Indian education sector.

Files containing confidential data of thousands of employees — such as salary, dates of birth, employee IDs and social security numbers — have been stolen from Sony servers, before being put on torrent networks. Article.

Several files being traded on torrent networks seen by this author include an global Sony employee list, a Microsoft Excel file that includes the name, location, employee ID, network username, base salary and date of birth for more than 6,800 individuals.

From the magnitude of data collection done by NSA and GCHQ as analyzed in this article, it looks like if I have accidentally deleted emails years back, I can still recover them from their databases.

It’s remarkable that just one single cable access (NIGELLA in Cornwall) provides almost one tenth of everything NSA collects from internet cables. This also means that besides a large number of small cables accesses, NSA can only have access to just a few more cables with a similar high capacity as FA1 and FEA.